Madeira (island)

It is the largest and most important of the islands of the archipelago. It lies between 32° 52′ 8″ and 32° 37′ 25″ north latitude, and between 16° 39′ 30″ and 17° 16′ 38″ west longitude (Greenwich). It is twenty-one and a half miles from Porto Santo (from Ponta de São Lourenço (‘St Lawrence Point’) to the Ilhéu de Baixo (‘lower islet’), or Ilhéu da Cal) and eleven miles from the Desertas (from Ponta de São Lourenço to Ilhéu Chão (‘flat islet’)). From the harbour of Funchal to the anchorage of the town (vila) of Porto Santo the distance is forty and a half miles. The island stretches from east to west and has a ‘shape tending towards a pentagon’, roughly defined by the points of São Lourenço to the east, Santa Cruz to the south, Pargo and Tristão to the west, and São Jorge to the north. Its greatest length, east to west, between the extreme limits of Ponta de São Lourenço and Ponta do Tristão, is 67 kilometres, and its greatest width, north to south, between the extreme limits of Ponta de São Jorge and Ponta da Cruz, is 28 kilometres. The perimeter of the coast is conjectured to be approximately 157 kilometres, and its area 500 square kilometres.

A high mountain range running from east to west divides Madeira into two coasts, the southern and the northern. In this range, whose heights rise from 1000 to 1861 metres, the island’s great streams have their source. In winter they carry large volumes of water, which have quite often caused damage in Funchal and at other points along the coast. The slopes of the central mountains are generally steeper on the north side than on the south. On the north side there are only two passable landing places, Porto Moniz (‘Moniz’s harbour’) and Porto da Cruz (‘harbour of the cross’), whereas on the southern coast there are several coves and bays where ships and boats can find shelter from the prevailing winds. The main spurs of these mountains are the Penha de Águia (‘eagle crag’) and the Cortado de Santana (‘Santana cut’) on the north coast, and Ponta do Pargo (‘sea bream point’), Cabo Girão and Cabo Garajau (‘tern cape’) on the south coast.

The highest summits of central Madeira are Pico Ruivo, Pico das Torres, Pico do Canário, Pico do Areeiro, Pico de Santo António, Pico Grande and Pico das Torrinhas. They surround the Curral das Freiras (‘nuns’ fold’), a vast profundidade (deep, roughly circular mountain basin) regarded by some geologists as a crater and by others as a valley of erosion. The most notable streams of the island are those of Machico, Santa Cruz, São Pedro, Porto Novo, João Gomes, Santa Luzia, São João, the Socorridos, Câmara de Lobos, the Ribeira Brava, Ponta do Sol, Madalena, São Bartolomeu, Janela, Seixal, São Vicente, the Moinhos, São Jorge and Faial.

In the bay of Funchal ships ride at anchor in complete safety in all winds except those from the quarters between south-west and south-east by way of south. Around the bay, on the lower slopes of the mountains and rising like an amphitheatre, stands the city of the same name. It is the capital of the island and of the whole archipelago, and has long been known for the mildness of its climate, the beauty of its surroundings, the lovely quintas (country estates) that adorn it and the courtesy of its inhabitants.

The island of Madeira has only one city, Funchal, and six towns, which, starting from the east, are Machico, Santa Cruz, Ribeira Brava, Ponta do Sol, Calheta and São Vicente.

The places in the interior of the island most worth visiting for the superb panoramas they command are Rabaçal, Monte Medonho, the Fontes da Ribeira do Inferno, the Cumeada de São Vicente, Pico Ruivo, Pico do Areeiro, the Boca dos Namorados, Ribeiro Frio, the Ribeira de São Jorge, Santana, Pico da Suna, etc. On the coast, too, there are places that deserve to be seen, such as Piedade, Ponta de São Lourenço, Garajau, Praia Formosa, Fojo, Cabo Girão, the mouth of the Ribeira da Janela and that of the Ribeira do Inferno, the Ribeira de João Delgado, the chapel of São Vicente, Entroza, the Ponte de São Jorge, the Rocha do Navio and Porto da Cruz. Many streams have beautiful waterfalls, and from every high point one can admire wide and varied views of unsurpassable beauty.

The Paul da Serra (‘upland marsh’) is the only plain of any size on Madeira, but it is an inhospitable place in winter because of the violence of the storms that break there.

Madeira’s roads are often appalling, and on some the gradient is so steep that they can be travelled only with great effort. The visitor can reach almost every spot on the outskirts of Funchal by ox-drawn cart, but to reach certain places in the interior and climb the rugged heights that make up a large part of the island, one must resort to the horse or the hammock (rede, slung from a pole and carried by two bearers), the latter being the most suitable means of transport for certain kinds of journey. (1921).

Funchal is linked to the Terreiro da Luta (‘ground of the fight’), above the church of Monte, by a lift or rack railway (1921), and Machico and Ribeira Brava can today be reached in reasonable comfort, since the roads now take motor traffic. The Cumeada de São Vicente, a point in the interior with astonishing views over both the north and the south of the island, has been accessible by car since 1916, and work has already begun on other roads intended to make it easier for tourists to discover the natural beauties of our land. In recent years the roads have been greatly developed, as will be seen in the article ‘Viação’.

Madeira produces vines, sugar cane, cereals, sweet potatoes, potatoes (semilhas, the Madeiran word), onions, various useful cucurbits and legumes, flax, sorghum, etc., and its flora is extremely rich: in the quintas and gardens one sees plants from almost every region of the globe, thriving as well as in their native lands. Besides all the European fruit trees, the island has custard apples, bananas, guavas, papayas, passion fruit and other species native to hot countries.

The seal, or monk seal (lobo marinho, literally ‘sea wolf’), and two bats are the only mammals that appear to be native, but birds, and above all molluscs and insects, are represented on the island by a great number of species. Madeiran waters yield a great number of fish species, some with very tasty flesh, and the turtle is not rare, although its eggs have never been found on Madeira or Porto Santo.

There are no metal mines or sulphur deposits on the island, but iron pyrites and specular iron have been found in small quantities near Ponta do Sol, and in Santo António and other places there are waters more or less rich in iron carbonate. Limestone is found in São Vicente, and in São Jorge there is a deposit of rather impure lignite.

Rain is scarce in the hot season, and in some years not a single drop falls in the low-lying region of Madeira during July and August. To remedy this shortage, numerous channels, or levadas (irrigation channels) (see that entry), have been built to carry water from the interior to various places. It is thanks to irrigation, practised here since very ancient times, that certain crops survive not only through the summer but also at other times when rain fails or is sparse. Some levadas were built by the State and others by private individuals, the latter being far more numerous than the former.

Madeira exports its excellent wines, wickerwork, embroidery, onions, butter, sugar, etc., and imports cereals, textiles, olive oil, paraffin, salt, grocery goods, etc. Among Madeiran industries, those deserving special mention are embroidery, the manufacture of sugar and spirit (aguardente, distilled from sugar cane or wine), butter-making, tuna canning, the weaving of straw for hats of various kinds, and wickerwork.

The first settlers of Madeira were the donataries and the people who accompanied them. Frutuoso relates that, when it came to settling the island, the King ‘ordered that the homicides in the kingdom’s gaols be handed over, of whom João Gonçalves Zarco would take none guilty of offences against the faith, or of treason, or of theft; of those guilty of other crimes, fugitives, he took all there were, and they were well treated by him; and of the other people, those who of their own will wished to seek a living and fortune were many, most of them from the Algarve’.

But if it is certain that the first people to colonise the lands of the archipelago came from Portugal, and especially from the Algarve, it is no less certain that this nucleus of settlers was joined over time by various elements from other parts. The sugar trade, and later the wine trade, drew numerous foreigners to Madeira in search of fortune, while many Moorish captives and Black and Canarian slaves were brought to this island to clear the land and be employed in other work.

Around 1486 there were many foreigners in Madeira who had become sugar growers and manufacturers, and for this reason they were twice ordered to leave the island and afterwards readmitted. When Frutuoso wrote ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra) in 1590, there were many English and Flemish families in Funchal, who carried on their business in the Rua dos Mercadores. The Flemish colony, still important at the beginning of the 17th century, later disappeared or merged with the Madeiran population, whereas the English colony survived and even grew from 1640 onwards, coming in the 19th century to hold a real preponderance in the island’s trade.

Castilian rule, which lasted for 60 years, brought a great number of Spaniards to Madeira; and when the British troops withdrew from this island after occupying it from 1801 to 1802 and from 1807 to 1814, they left some families settled here.

From what has been said, it is clear that the population of Madeira is very far from homogeneous. Intermixing in varying proportions and in various directions over more than 4 centuries has somewhat modified the original dominant type, giving rise to variations that often do not accord with the island’s geographical position.

It is at village festivals and processions that one can best observe the traces left in the Madeiran population by the various elements that settled on this island from the middle of the 15th century. Fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes, characteristic of the peoples of northern Europe, are not rare among the women, and it may be said that 20 to 30 per cent of children are blond until the age of 6 to 8. The men are as a rule more or less dark, but the blond type is sometimes seen among them too, though much less often than among the women.

The Berber type, marked by a swarthy complexion, especially in men, a somewhat hooked nose and straight black hair, appears in a somewhat modified form at some points on the east coast, and it is natural that it should derive chiefly from the Moors who once lived on the island. ‘The city of Funchal,’ says Dr Azevedo in his notes to ‘Longing for the Homeland’, ‘had its Moorish quarter, and tradition holds that many Moors lived in the parish (freguesia) of Ponta do Sol.’

It is likely that the arrival of many Castilian families in Madeira during Philippine rule (Spanish Habsburg rule over Portugal, 1580–1640) contributed somewhat to the spread of the Berber type on the island; nevertheless, it was not from Spain, where it is common, but from Morocco that this type first reached us, a type still so easy to recognise among the population of certain Madeiran localities.

In the 18th-century parish registers there are many records of baptisms, marriages and deaths of Black slaves, and the narrative of Captain Cook’s second voyage states that in 1772 there was a prodigious number of Black and mixed-race people in Madeira, some free, others slaves. Dr Azevedo, who wrote the notes to the ‘Longing for the Homeland’ in 1870, says that people of mixed African descent were then numerous, ‘especially in Curral das Freiras and in the north of the island’.

Certain individuals, mainly from the lower classes of society, still show their affinities with the Ethiopian race in their tightly curled hair, the shape of the nose and the colour of the whites of the eyes, and sometimes of the skin; but these affinities are tending to disappear through intermixing, and it may even be said that they no longer exist in a great many localities on the island.

The country people of Madeira are as a rule of vigorous constitution and endure the greatest fatigue without feeling the effects. The sanguine temperament is common among them, whereas in the city the bilious-sanguine temperament predominates, mixed to a greater or lesser degree sometimes with the lymphatic and sometimes with the nervous.

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Great robberies and murders,’ says Dr Barral, ‘are rare in Madeira; the studied, organised, immoral and slanderous begging of the great cities does not yet exist there; and a great number of the island’s inhabitants have no idea of the extraordinary crimes committed today in Europe, in the midst of civilisation.

Dr Hans Sloane, who visited Madeira at the beginning of the 18th century, relates that all the merchants went about armed and that none of them dared go out at night for fear of being wounded or killed. The same physician also says that to be rid of an enemy it was enough to give a small coin to a black man, and that on one occasion he treated a priest who had been wounded at night after being mistaken for another person whom they meant to kill.

We do not know whether Dr Sloane’s account is exaggerated. What we do know is that murders are extremely rare in Madeira today, and that the streets of Funchal and its suburbs can be walked at any hour of the night without great risk, even though the police are too few to watch over the citizens’ safety. All modern writers do justice to the people of Madeira, regarding them as among the most orderly and generous in the world.

In a work entitled Breve e verdadeira demonstração dos principios e progressos do governo que João António de Sá Pereira fez na ilha da Madeira, we read that there was a custom, dating from ancient times, whereby women about to marry fled their parents’ houses to join their sweethearts, and that on the following day ‘the future bride and groom dressed with care to go to the houses of their friends and announce that so-and-so had left her parents’ house to marry.’ The same work adds that this practice ‘was common, with few exceptions, among the nobility’ and that when it was presumed that so-and-so wished to marry so-and-so, arrangements were made as to when the night of the flight, or of the ‘theft’, would be.

The governor João António de Sá Pereira, ‘the Madeiran Pombal’, as Dr Álvaro Rodrigues de Azevedo calls him, sought to put an end to these and many other abuses practised on the island. For this reason, when he departed for Lisbon on 10 June 1777, many houses were illuminated and many fireworks were let off. He witnessed all these displays of rejoicing, because the ship on which he was to sail could not leave the port of Funchal at once for lack of wind.

The old habit, long since vanished from the island, of maidens fleeing their parents’ house before the wedding day shows us that it is a mistake to suppose that simplicity of manners always prevailed among our forebears. Reprehensible practices and customs belong to every age; and if part of the present generation shows clear signs of corruption, it must nevertheless be granted that certain social conventions are more respected today than in former times.

The common people of Madeira, almost always well disposed, today generally live carefree and happy lives. Any branch of industry or trade currently yields considerable profits, and higher wages and the rising value of the produce of the land have brought the working classes and farmers an independence and well-being they did not enjoy in other times. This state of affairs has not, however, noticeably affected the simple ways of the country people, whose aspirations remain those of their forebears. Only in the city and its surroundings does one sometimes observe among the working classes spendthrift habits and a certain taste for pleasure which certainly did not exist only a very few years ago.

The island of Madeira is unquestionably one of the most important Portuguese colonies. Remarkable for the fertility of its soil, its excellent wines, the mildness of its climate and the natural beauty with which it is endowed, it has long been known as a favoured land, thanks to the excellent descriptions of it published by many foreigners.

Much still remains to be done, however, for this island to become what it can and should be. Nature has been lavish with it, clothing it in charms that may be equalled but not surpassed; yet these charms are not always revealed to the eyes of the foreigner eager for impressions, because of the backward state of our roads.

The building of good roads fit for motor cars, linking Funchal to the places most famed for their beauty or for the superb views they offer, is an urgent necessity if we wish to draw from the visits of foreigners to this island all the benefit they can bring. If tomorrow tourists can visit the Rabaçal, the Fanal, the Paul da Serra, the Ribeiro Frio and Santo da Serra as comfortably as they visit Monte and other places around the city today, we shall have endowed the island with a great improvement and assured its inhabitants a future full of the broadest prosperity (1921).

In this article, Madeira (from the 1st edition), some general data and information are briefly set out; the articles under the same title that follow seek to provide more detailed material on all the subjects indicated.

Its capital and the centre of all its activity is the city of Funchal, with which we have already dealt at some length on pages 59–68 of this volume.